You recognize Vincent Kartheiser as Peter Campbell, the utterly obsequious and calculating account executive at Sterling Cooper. You know, that fictional Madison Avenue advertising agency on the much talked about AMC series Mad Men. I didn’t say “much hyped” because hype requires that the product or vehicle receiving the accolades does not deserve them, which Mad Men certainly does. It won 16 Emmys as a freshman series, and 16 last year — including Best Drama Series, a first for a basic cable network. Then this year, it repeated seizing Best Drama, and also had 4 out of 5 nominations for Outstanding Writing for a Drama Series (it won for “Meditations In An Emergency” —the Season Two finale where Don Draper returns from Palm Springs and destroys Duck with one fell sentence). Not bad for a show whose episodes have an average budget of around $2 mill — about half the budget of The Sopranos, on which Mad Men creator Matt Weiner sharpened his razor-like writing chops. Yes, Mad Men deserves all the accolades heaped upon it, and Kartheiser’s importance in the show is second only to Jon Hamm’s bulletpoint reprisal of Don Draper — the brooding advertising messiah that makes all the women swoon and all the men fall in line. Yes, there are other characters as important as Peter Campbell (Elisabeth Moss’ Peggy Olson and January Jones’ Betty Draper spring to mind), but none greater.

Mad Men, by interpretation, is a dream. What exists on the surface — power, success, beauty, ambition — is a thin veil for the cloudy, frothing world that lies beneath. Defeat, remorse, melancholy, ennui, unfulfillment, guilt…these are the true currents of the Mad Men world. The show is all subtext, masked within a stylized microcosm of the idylicized view of the Kennedy Era. While moist-eyed nostalgia tells us that America’s Camelot was a time of prosperity, suburban splendor, 20-foot Cadillacs and honeyed hams roasting in every pot, the reality was a world where housewives marched blindly incapacitated under medication, society lived in constant fear of nuclear devastation, and black Americans couldn’t even vote. If that is utopia, sign me up for Dick Cheney and John Rumsfeld’s view of bliss, cause it can’t be any worse. And perhaps no character better embodies this cultural dissonance more so than Pete Campbell — the Ivy League graduate, successful executive, happy groom. The reality is, of course, that he’s merely a replaceable cog in an unsympathetic machine, a man anxiously tightrope walking a career founded on the favor of a finicky father-in-law and forever on the precipice of utter failure. And behind the steely blue eyes is a boy cracking from the pressures of a fractured married life and an ice-thin career shelf.

But the funny thing is, once Peter Campbell showers out the copious Pomme Aid in his hair, the transformation back to Vincent Kartheiser is pretty remarkable. Aesthetically the two look fairly different, but the one thing that uniting them is a mischievous (some might even say evil) glint in his eye. You see, Vincent Kartheiser will fuck with you. No, not in any malicious sense but he certainly will test your gullibility. (I would love to tell you the story he told me about a former junkie director he had, but A) I would most likely be sued off the web for its utter depravity; B) he launched into it the moment I told him I was turning off my mic; and C) I’m pretty sure he was pulling my leg.)

Hit the Jump to read the unedited discussion between us. It is long, and very geeky (at least for Part One) on the Mad Men front…but if you love the show as much as I do, I would imagine you’d enjoy the unadulterated insight. If you don’t know or like Mad Men, well, there’s really no point reading any further…

“I don’t believe in good or bad — I just don’t believe in right or wrong.”

As an introduction, we met while Vincent was awaiting his lunch, and my voice recorder decided to die. The idea of using my iPhone as a substitute recorder came up, and this is where we begin…

Vincent Kartheiser: I’m sorry if I’m a bit spaced out today, I only got like 2 hours of sleep last night. I’ll ask my friend Jeffrey about your iPhone, man. He’s the coolest nerd in the world. I mean Rick [Sommer] on our show is also one of the coolest nerds. But he’s like a Gameboard nerd.

Like World of Warcraft or something?

No, like these really crazy board games that I’ve never played before. I really haven’t played with him, but I’ve called him a couple of times with my family, “Hey, we’re about to board game.” And he’s helped me out. And they’re cool games. They’re different – you really do have to use your brain. Which is nice, because a lot of board games – whatever. Not that I’m that into board games…

Don’t worry, I’m not going to make you sound like some obsessive board game nerd.

No, it’s okay, you can. I mean, it’s just Rich is really into it, and then my other friend Jeffrey Aaron (500 Days of Summer) I’ll go to his house and he’s like, “Check this out.” And he hits his iPhone and his TV turns on, and starts the fire, and he’ll tap another button and like a little helicopter comes up with your gin martini and drops it down.

That’s almost as good as having your kids do it. I love how Don Draper has his kids mixing him Cosmopolitans and drinks – Old Fashions and martinis, telling them how many cherries to drop.

Yeah! And you know what? I don’t see why not. You know, I think kids are raised so strange and so soft nowadays. It’s kind of sad to see. And not that I can blame it. We have this very kind of sterile world that we all live in now. And this is kind of when it all began in the 50s/60s, you know. Everything’s gotta be wrapped in plastic and, you know, safe.

There was a line in an episode I watched yesterday that kind of struck me, it hit me what a transitional era the 50s or 60s were. Draper tells his kids how when he was little he used to go to an outhouse, and grab a rope when it was dark and follow it to the outhouse, and the kid was like, “I’m so glad I don’t live in the Olden Days.” It struck me as like, wow, right about then would be when that cultural transition started happening in America, of people moving from rural farms to the suburbs. Or white flight from urban centers. Not that you can’t go to Maine and still find pockets of that antiquity, but that era was when that huge shift was happening.

Yeah.

Do you ask your parents for advice on that stuff, because they were there and they were young?

No. I’ve never asked my parents about any advice on that.

Not for any kind of historical context?

No. Especially because we can’t talk about the scripts, you know? My parents came to the set one day and they were blown away. Like, my dad found like four or things in the Draper residence that his dad had. But my parents are a little younger than that. My parents were probably just 10 years old in the 60s when this was going on. And they do remember lots of things, like the doctor smoking and all of that. But we also don’t play the time that much on our show. Like right now we live in 2009. And this is a crazy time — there’s all these movements going on, there’s a war. There’s a lot of fucked-up shit going on in our world. But you and I? That doesn’t really play into our conversation. It plays into the bigger scheme of things. But it won’t become historically relevant for 30-40 years. So if you make a movie in 40 years about this time, and it’s not about the politicians or about the crisis, it’s about people. People in the agency industry.

Yeah.

It’s not fair to make the times such a cultural reference. Like, the Cuban Missile Crisis was a big deal, just like 9/11 was a big deal for us, you know? But not every day is gonna be fraught with “the times”.

But there are instances when contextual events invade everyone’s life on the show, like when Marilyn Monroe dies, and everybody’s crying. There’s moments that the outside world infiltrates the intimate world.

Well, as an actor you can’t approach it with that historical gravitas. Because it’s not relevant to that character at that moment, at that time. And also, my parents, I would never reference too much from people who remember the times. At least not my parents, because they tend to exaggerate. But we have such a great team of people who lived then, who worked then.

Do you have consultants on set?

I find the only person I need to talk to is [series creator] Matthew [Weiner] because he talks to all of them.

There seems to be really a continuous look and feel to Mad Men, and I’m wondering is it difficult to maintain that? Because it seems to me like you guys work with a lot of different directors; there seems to be at least five or six different ones…

No, you’re right. Yeah. Your question is ultimately, “How do you stay so consistent?”

Yeah. And is it almost to the point that you can plug-and-play the director?

Well, no. I mean, directors do have certain styles, and they all have different fortes. I mean, Phil Abraham was one of our directors pretty consistently. He was our D.P. (Director of Photography) for the pilot, and was our D.P. for the first season. And I think part of the second…He was the D.P. on Sopranos for all eight years, or whatever. And then, so when he comes in, he designed the look of this show. He designed that idea of Don Draper – the back of Don Draper’s head. He designed all those low shots. Right in the beginning, he designed the flavor for this show. In the sense of how they shoot a scene, where they place the actor and things like that.

It’s super cinematic.

It’s super cinematic, so when he comes on to direct, he gets there like a week early and for him it’s second nature, I think, to follow through with that feeling. We have a great D.P. now, Chris Manley, who can unite it all.

The director may be different, but the D.P.’s still the same. He keeps the look consistent. But does it disrupt you guys at all switching directors?

Well, no, because the pieces are so strong. I mean at this point, because there is a feel to the show, it almost makes it easier. Because the boundaries have been set. You can look at a shot and say, “That’s not Mad Men.” I think in some shows, directors come in and every director does have its own flavor – and directors, I think, do add little things to it, but because the show really already has a point of view and already has a way that it’s been shot and lit, and we’ve had the same costume designer – we’ve had Dan Bishop since the beginning — and everything stayed consistent there, that it’s a nice little humming machine at this point. And the director kind of jumps on board with this race car that we’ve been driving, and he just takes it out for a spin.

Did you ever watch Twin Peaks?

I have watched Twin Peaks. I never watched it when it was on, but I watched it since.

Because you can tell when David Lynch stops directing the series. It’s like night and day. All of a sudden he stops directing and somebody else steps in – and you’re like, “Well this feels weird.” Then you look at the credits and all of a sudden David Lynch isn’t directing anymore. Everything’s off — the lighting, the pacing, etc.

Yeah. I think you’re right. Matthew Weiner has a good way of imparting what he wants to the directors and to the writers.

[Starts looking around for the waiter, who has been completely missing our entire interview.]

I went to my lawyer’s. I had a half an hour off and I thought “I’ll go to my lawyer’s; maybe he’ll buy me lunch.” But he was with another client.

Ah, fuck him.

No, I can’t fuck him.

Oh, yeah. He can fuck you.

He can fuck me so hard. I don’t even know what I sign. He just puts it in front of me, and I was like, “two hours of sleep.” Not good.

“You’re right in the sense that underneath it was crumbling because it was still built on man, and man is fallible. And man is greedy and lost and confused and insecure.”

Go back a little bit to that statement you said before about how it’s difficult for you to have so much time off even when you’re shooting. Does it throw you off your game a little bit? Is it kind of like if you’re a basketball player and you’re cold on the bench?

Right, and sometimes there’s strife because coaches are trying new things. In this case, it’s like we’re all glad that we’re on this bench and we understand that, like, our Phil Jackson knows that you’re best for seven minutes in this game, and even if you want fucking 28 minutes, that’s not going to help the team. And, so, even though we’re sitting on the bench, you know the guy who’s in my position is playing point guard right now. I guess I would definitely not be the point guard, I’d be like, what? I’d be like a forward or some shit.

Shooting guard.

Ha! Right. Shooting guard. You know, I’m rooting for him, too. You know what I’m saying? We trust Matt. I’d rather be used smartly in an episode than just put in because they want to use everyone in every episode. You know what I mean?

Yeah, yeah.

Like the mandatory scene. Because storywise, it makes sense to really stay with one story. Like people don’t like useless subplots. I hate them. And I hate when there’s like a movie or a TV show and they have these crazy nonsensical stories…

Just to keep some guy working.

I don’t know why they do it. Fuck them. Unless they want to hire me.

Then they’re geniuses.

Then they’re fucking geniuses.

It seems you’re right, that there’s always phases. Jon Hamm’s always the man, but then different characters will rotate as the “secondary” character. Like there were four episodes we were watching in season 2, and I’m like, “Is it me or is Pete Campbell the second most important person in this show?” And then you disappeared for three episodes, and Peggy would become the top person. And then you’d come back and we’d be like, “What’s going on with Pete?”

Right. It’s War and Peace. It makes you want it more when it comes back. It’s like if you just ate salad every day, and ate at your favorite restaurant every day, it’s like, “Ugh.”

Peter Campbell [Kartheiser] staring at the real object of his desires…and roiling envy, Peggy. [Elisabeth Moss]

Look, I love Law and Order. The first three years Law and Order was on, I watched that show so fucking much, and still sometimes I’ll be at home, I’ll be tired and, like, it’s 2:00 a.m., I know nothing’s on. I can find Law and Order and be like, “Damn.” You know? It’s well put together. It’s a good show, but you can’t have it every day, you know? You gotta switch that shit up. And that’s what Matthew does. He brings you a little bit here, a little bit there. Like you have your steak with every meal, you know, but you’re gonna get different delicious sides.

It also feels like it’s three seasons in, and it still seems all like a prologue. Like we’re leading into something. Do you know what I mean? Like you still have no idea what’s going to happen.

Kind of like life. I mean, doesn’t your life always feel like a prologue, too? Like you’re always preparing for like that next big step. And even when it happens, it’s like, “Oh, it’s just another ridge.” You know?

Absolutely.

And I think that’s one of the themes of the show is there’s like, there’s this guy Don Draper who has everything, man! And he so much wants more. Like he has the perfect wife, right? This gorgeous, wonderful wife, and he fucks everything that moves. And like it’s still not enough. And he gets the power and the partnership and he won’t sign the contact – you know? It’s still not enough. Like it’s all a prologue; it’s all what comes next. But in some way it should be. I mean, people who live too much in the past are really fucking bores.

True. There’s also living in the moment, though. In other words you could be thinking [Mad Men] is a just prologue in  Kartheiser’s life, and not realizing that this project could be your greatest work.

Oh, absolutely.

And while wondering what’s going to be the next thing, you’re ignoring the present moment, and are therefore not aware of what you have before you.

Acting for me is kind of like sex in that sense. It’s like the greatest sex you’ve ever had is the sex you’re having right at that moment. You know? Like objectively, this might be the greatest thing I ever did, but the greatest thing that I’m doing is the thing I’m working on at that moment. And maybe Mad Men is the greatest thing for me; I like it most. I like playing it the most so far, but it’s really in that moment, man.

But if we keep with that analogy and take it a step further, maybe the sex is getting better just because your girlfriend keeps getting hotter, aka your roles keep getting better.

Yeah.

You could end up some years from now, all of a sudden, even though you’re getting better at sex, you’re getting better “girls”, but maybe someday you’ll end up with like a real ugly wife — like maybe you’re 60 and doing dinner theatre in Tampa — and be like, “Wow, back then really was the best sex I was having.”

No, you’re right. Absolutely right. But if you’re actually having sex, that’s not the thought you’ll be thinking. Not while you’re actually having sex.

Good point.

You’re sitting back – like if I’m not presently acting, but if I’m about to go on stage…oh, fuck, I lost my thought. It must be sleep deprivation. It got me.

It felt like you were on the cusp of something…

I was on the cusp of greatness. Okay, so I’ll just try to re-find my thought, and we’ll deal with that later on.

Let me tweak the question a little bit. Does acting still give you a thrill? You know, you’ve been acting since you were a kid. Do you still get butterflies?

Well, I usually make an analogy to a relationship. When you first get into a relationship — at least when you’re young and you first get into a relationship – I’m realizing as you get older when you get into a relationship now you’re kind of like, “I like them – they’re okay, but I’m waiting.”

You’re more measured about it.

Right. But when you’re young and you meet someone and you fall in love, it’s like, “I love you!” and you’re jumping from the top of the roof, and you’re ecstatic and you can’t stop talking about them, and how great they are, and that’s all you want to do is be with them. And then like five years in, you know, maybe you fall out of love for a little while, then you come back to it. And I’ve been in this relationship with acting for 25 years, you know? And so, people come to me – I live in L.A., it’s full of young people who are thrilled about acting and they come to me and they’ve been doing it for a couple of years and it’s like, “Aww, yeah!” I’m still there with it, but it’s a different kind of thing – it’s a different kind of relationship I have with it now. And I still do get really nervous, you know? There’s nothing I’ve found that makes me as deliriously happy, you know? Like throughout it, and for like 10 minutes after doing it. Just deliriously happy. And then tortuously regretful after that.

Wow. I guess it really is like sex.

Kind of. Because maybe I just don’t care about it as much as I used to. But now it’s like, “Hey, if I didn’t do my best, so be it!” You know? Like, “Sorry, babe, don’t tell your friends about it.”

Is there a particular thrill in playing somebody like Pete Campbell, or it doesn’t matter the character, it’s always the same thrill?

No, there’s a particular thrill with Pete. I mean, Pete is the greatest written character I’ve ever had in my life.

I love him, that’s why I ask.

Oh, yeah. No, he’s great and – I mean the nerves and things aren’t any different, but the joy that I get in completing those story arcs. The joy that I get in that kind of conceited, self-deserving . . . It’s fun, man. I mean, people just shake their heads on set.

I think you really just nailed the character. And the thing I think is funny is that there’s certain moments – just certain looks you give. Whether it’s you talking to your wife Trudy. Like with her, you don’t even really consider her an equal. It’s almost like somebody that you put up with. Who knows if you even want to be married; you’re going through the motions. And there’s certain looks you give her that you would never give Draper.

Yeah. And we owe that to the story. We owe that because the story is pointing that way. Jon Hamm and me – that on-screen relationship is like, for those first two seasons was very solid. It was very consistent. Every time we’re in the room together, as those characters, in those scenes, we had demeanorships.

Campbell [Kartheiser] and his wife, Trudy [Alison Brie]

Which was he was the man, and you were the sort of obsequious underling.

Well, yeah. And that character openly – the tone of the way that we always interacted with each other was just always very different. And Jon Hamm has a very strong presence, and so, if he wants to show a female love in a scene, or dominate her, he can do that. And he dominates Pete, you know? And so a lot of me in those scenes is just reacting to what he’s giving me. I’m almost always walking into his office, or standing up in the boardroom with him or something. And every time that Pete’s kind of stood up to Don, “You know, when I was in college…” or “I’ve got your number,” Don comes right back at him. Stronger. Twice as strong. “You’re fired. You’re out of here.” Or, you know, openly demeaning, or right in his face, like when he tried to blackmail him, and he just walked right up to him and says, “This isn’t gonna happen.”

And you backed up a step, literally.

It’s great writing, man. I mean, it jumps off the page for you. If you don’t understand that scene, you haven’t been acting for 20 years.

But you got the tone of the character, of the relationship, pretty quick it seems.

Well, in real life, he’s definitely the alpha male. But he’s also not my boss. I mean, we’re peers, you know what I mean. Like, I respect him very much, and he works much longer hours, and I would consider when he’s on set that my demeanor definitely shifts to give him the stage. But an episode where it’s me and my wife and her parents or something, I have a very different kind of hold over that set; I’m a very different beast. Whereas, if Jon Hamm’s on set, it’s much more his story line. And it’s a natural thing for us to do because of the relationship on the show, too. It’s a natural thing for me and my wife when we see each other to say, “Hi,” and you know, look at each other lovingly and care about each other. Because you’re going to have to do it for maybe five-six years, you know? That being said, I mean, Jon’s my friend. I really like the guy, and I mean, he’s fucking cool. He never makes anyone feel like – I’ve worked with guys who…

…can demean you?

They don’t even need to. It doesn’t even help with the show at all, you know. Jon is nothing like that. He wouldn’t – I mean, any alpha male status he has is alpha male status that people give him. It’s nothing that he aspires to or demands. It just is what it is.

Ok.

This is the world. And men know this shit. Like this is the unspoken language of man, right? And I think the way to succeed is to be happy with your place. And, you know, that’s something Pete really doesn’t understand. Pete wants to be fuckin’ alpha male, and he’s just not. And, you know, you have to suck it up sometimes.

Peter Campbell [Kartheiser] eliciting the usual look of affinity from Don Draper [Jon Hamm]

In the DVD commentary Rich Sommer asks you: “Do you think Pete’s good or bad?” And he keeps bringing up how Pete’s bad and how, “Nobody likes Pete.” Your response is something like, “Man, you gotta get over this good and bad thing.” Do you think that’s also sort of a theme of Mad Men? Good and bad, morality, or at least the illusion of good vs. bad?

It’s a theme of fuckin’ life. And the fact that people don’t understand that shit is retarded. I mean, the idea that we still walk around thinking that there’s an actual right and wrong way to do things, and commonly do the wrong thing. I mean, if you believe in right and wrong, then how have you not analyzed your life and become right in every way?

Cause it’s easier to do wrong, maybe?

There’s no wrong. Wrong for what? Wrong for who? I mean, I watched this movie, The Cove, last night. Have you heard about this?

The dolphin one?

Yeah. I mean, fuck! You know. Is that wrong? And don’t we do that to pigs every day – I mean, don’t like 50,000 pigs die a week in this . . .? And the pig is like the third – fourth smartest animal? I mean, like what’s wrong? What’s right? So if you really want to start laying down labels, I mean it’s a slippery slope. I just don’t believe in good or bad. I just don’t believe in right or wrong. I think there’s intelligent decisions, and there’s logical decisions, and then there’s non-logical decisions, and most people make non-logical decisions because they feel that they’re right. Which doesn’t exist! But that’s just my own fuckin’ theory on life.

Right.

Wrong. Ha-ha.

The interesting thing is Mad Men has become a topic of conversation, of zeitgeist like Sopranos used to be. And the one other theme that I find real interesting, and you tell me if you’ve seen this or if it’s in my imagination, is the idea that you know, like, people think the fifties were like this perfect time in America — but it was only the perfect time for white men in America.

Right.

I mean, black people weren’t even allowed to vote, still, in those days! You know what I mean? So there’s like this vision of this big utopia, but it’s a utopia for a small sector of society. It seems to me that Mad Men addresses that in a very quiet way — like you were talking about Don Draper [Jon Hamm] having a perfect life, but so does Betsy [January Jones]. Her kids couldn’t be cuter. Her husband’s handsome, successful. He was cheating on her, sure, but take that aside for a minute, and she’s fucking suffering. Like the woman’s completely crumbling, and that’s one of the main story lines. The first episode a black busboy gets reprimanded for talking to Draper, or they work the elevators and say, “Yessir.” So it seems to show, through subtext, that even though there’s this veneer of perfection, that it wasn’t that happy of a time. And underneath the surface, everything was crumbling.

One thing in there is that, you know, they say it was the perfect golden age for America. And, so, no, not maybe for the citizens of America, but for the idea of America. America in the world’s perspective had done right. And was creating good. Right? There are these words again, you know? But in America – in the global world, this is what we were: We were making art. We were a cultural center. We were exporting tons of goods. We had inventions, and people flocked here to go to school. People from Europe and other countries came here to fill our universities with geniuses and then they would invent things, and they would get the patent. For America it was the golden age in the sense that we could have done something great with it. But you’re right in the sense that underneath it was crumbling because it was still built on man, and man is fallible. And man is greedy. And lost and confused and insecure. And he lets those things, his emotions and what he thinks is right and wrong and bad and good and all of those things, ruin it. You know? The way they dealt with blacks and women and minorities and homosexuals was because they truly thought it was the right way to do it. They truly thought that that was…

That was accepted. There’s lots of things we do today that someday in 50-60 years we’ll look back and say, “How could we do that?”

You know?” How could we do that as a species? And I think they failed. I think the American dream failed. But this was a time that it was still a dream, you know? It was like being 19 and saying, “I’m going to go to L.A. and become a movie star!” And then you turn 27 and you go, you know, it’s over. And even if you go back to Ohio and end up having a great life, you’ll still look back on the dream, you know? And that’s what I think people are doing is, we fucked up, man. I mean, America – America spoiled itself. And the American dream actually is what killed it. You know? The American dream came true: The suburb, the house, the car. Sorry. The second house. The dream, it came true for a lot of people. I mean, it’s really – you know, for blacks, women, homosexuals, minorities of that time, it must have been so – so frustrating to see America being heralded as this great, great place.

Right, because you weren’t living it.

Turn the hose on them, right.

And they weren’t Americans in a way. I mean the gay people to this day now, it seems to me that they’re not being able to be treated equally, either. But, you’re right. Idealize what you want America, or the world, to be in 50 years. Maybe we won’t be slaughtering dolphins as much.

Well, I feel like we’re regressing, actually. And I think that’s why this is so important. I think like the last 10 years, and really 20 years, we’ve really taken a step backward, and not that we haven’t been slowly moving forward, but it’s like in other ways it’s like getting pulled. And so, I think that’s another reason that Mad Men is singing out to a certain specific group of people. I mean, people in the know love our show. But it’s not Twilight, you know what I mean?

Certainly not.

Most people don’t really realize that the gravity of our social idiocy. And I think this show is about a time when they were creating an idea of more and excess and buy buy buy buy, you know? And advertising’s a big part of that.

Oh, it’s the heart of it.

It’s the heart of it, baby. And honestly, that’s all we sell anymore in America is marketing. You know? Nine out of 10 people I meet are in marketing. No one really makes anything.

It’s funny that marketing is essentially Draper’s skill.

Oh, yeah.

Monetizing emotions is basically what Draper does.

Yeah. Using your own ideas against you, kind of in a slovenly sense.

.

Click here for PART TWO of the Vincent Kartheiser interview, where we discuss the genius of Mitch Hedberg, the biology of monogamy, life with Jon Hamm and why he takes the bus everywhere in LA……